GD-ROM Dumping Guide

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Revision as of 20:43, 21 March 2018

This is a step-by-step guide designed to be easy to follow so that you can make reproducible, good dumps of your GDs to the Redump standard.

What are GDs?

GDs—or Gigadiscs—are the type of optical media used by the Sega Dreamcast as well as the Sega NAOMI, Sega NAOMI 2, Sega Chihiro and Triforce arcade systems. It is special compared to its relative—the CD—in that it contains both a low density (LD) and a high density (HD) area. To get a good dump, you need to extract them both from the disc.

How do I know if I have a GD?

If you have any of the officially released discs for the Dreamcast or any of the above mentioned arcade systems, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a GD. The Dreamcast did however support loading of MIL-CDs, which lead to a number of unlicensed software being pressed on regular CDs. Check for the GD-ROM logo on the disc or check the reflective side of the disc for a visible LD–HD divide if you are unsure.

So I've got a GD. What now?

First you need to make sure you have the necessary equipment. To dump a GD you need:

• A Windows PC
• Compatible drive(s)
• An empty CD-R or CD-RW disc
• DiscImageCreator
• DCDumper

Dumping the LD area

This is the easy part. Make sure you have a compatible drive and have downloaded DiscImageCreator.

1. Open up the folder where you downloaded DiscImageCreator (DIC).
2. Extract the DIC zip into a new folder.
3. Enter the folder in which you extracted DIC and open the Release_ANSI folder.

Dumping the HD area

Submitting your dump info

Compatible drives

GDs are strange in that they contain two distinctly different areas of data. What this means to you is that you will have to dump the disc's LD and HD area separately. Unfortunately, this also means that you will need special hardware.

For dumping the LD area, the same rules apply as in dumping a CD, as they use the same technology. A list of compatible drives for dumping LD area is found below (and a more up-to-date list can be found in the CD Dumping Guide.)

But for the HD area the process is different, and you need one of the following drives: